Calcutta

Psycho was good. Hitchcock’s films are like guilty trips to a morbid, forbidden closet of horrors. Strangers and pretty women who have older memories of being someone else. Strange twists and Freudian knots. Their favorite theme. They want to watch M but haven’t been able to get a copy.

A group of hand-driven carts swing by, lungi-clad swarthy men with callused hands and very, very tired feet.

They saw Ray’s Kanchenjunga; a brand new ‘real-time’ film, cross cut between smaller stories of many people in the same place, at the same time. Marvelous, but definitely a film set with more foreign audiences in mind.

As the sun crosses overhead and the ground around them gets more crowded and dirtier, their discussions become heated debates, raging in Bengali and English and surrounded by total chaos.

The need to make B-grade science fiction/horror that would make Roger Corman cry with joy and would contrast the ‘artsy’ films. Heart-felt ambitions about making a film that even normal folk could honor. Stories about lost children from nearby Bangladesh, probably a biopic of someone important.

The banker’s son talks very less; he sips his tea and observes. The other three murmur that he's already a film-maker - he observes. It’s strange to see how much they contrast the world outside; beggars pleading for a few ten and twenty paisa coins to get their morning’s only bread,families overburdened by their luggage, waiting for a ride home.

Inevitably, the talk concludes in a plan to make a film, no matter what the consequences. It would be a film with no identifiable genre, with a little of Frankenstein vibes (to please the two horror lovers), and with a politically motivated theme (to please the other two).

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